iPhone 4S debuts to mixed reactions
Tim Cook delivers his first keynote speech
Tuesday evening brought us Tim Cook’s first keynote as Apple’s outright CEO, but that wasn’t the largest change as Apple turned away from its huge yearly update of the iPhone to instead offer punters an incrementally upgraded version, the iPhone 4S.
Key features on the new phone include an upgrade to the A5 processor found on the iPad, an upgraded camera, faster data transfer rates, as well as a new voice controlled ‘assistant’ Siri. With the exception of the new display and Siri the updates are all internal, providing snappier performance without much of an UI revamp.
Siri, however, proved to be the star of the show. The assistant, originally created by a company for the earlier iPhones (now purchased by Apple), attempts to intelligently guess your voice requests and answer your questions. Ask it ‘what’s the weather like where I am now?’, for example, and it should pull your location from the GPS, look up the weather for it and push out a weather forecast for you in a few seconds. It’s an exciting feature, but it’s not hard to imagine the ridicule that would be heaped on anyone poncing around London streets conversing with their phone.
Otherwise, reactions to the new iDevice were mixed. While Apple has managed to raise the bar in some way at every iteration of the iPhone, this update put it squarely where other competing Android devices have been for the last few months.
The fact is that after the minor price cut, Apple is competing directly with Samsung and Motorola on price, a position it isn’t holding in any other markets. This is probably indicative of how important Apple finds it to get these devices into people’s hands - with Android phones quantitatively outstripping iOS devices by a large margin, Apple will not want to lose out on the steady revenue stream of a strong app market. Also worth a mention is Apple’s refresh of the iPod lineup, which sees the Nano now available as a watch and the Touch available in both black and white with a storage upgrade to 64GB.
Given Apple’s strong fanbase it would be foolish not to expect the regular queues for the 4S in a week’s time, but whether you buy one of the new 4Ss or not will likely depend on where you lean on the Android/Apple debate. In case you’re an Apple fan, this is probably a good chance to refurbish your phone to give it some top-notch speed and graphical goodness; in case you’re not, look up the Samsung Galaxy S II for a similar specification at a similar price, or wait for Samsung’s ‘Something BIG’ event next week, which will probably reveal the Nexus Prime in all it’s cutting edge glory.
